Sleeping Things

by Holly Iglesias

Overview

Sleeping Things is luminous, marvelously succinct, and always engaging. Iglesias renders the spectacle of growing up not with reflexive, all-too-easy nostalgia but with clear-eyed affection, meticulous precision and gusto, giving day-to-day incidents and reclaimed details of that hopeful, rambunctious Cold War era a sense of delightful enterprise and luster. This new book is a refreshingly artful, savvy meditation on the past, rife with compassion and humor, one to celebrate, savor, and enjoy! -- Cyrus Cassells

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941209769
Publisher:	Press 53
Publication date:	03/15/2018
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.23(d)

Table of Contents

I.

Sturdy Child

The Fruits of Prayer Are Many, The Fruits of the Flesh Are Few

In My Day A Penny Went Somewhere

Small World

Parochial

We Interrupt Our Regular Programming

Hiroshima Flats

Epic of the Material World

Gesundheit

The Road to Cana

Suffer Little Children and Forbid Them Not

A Child’s Book of Knowledge: 00.1—00.3

Cuban Missal Crisis

White Flight

Remorse

Magisterium, Double Negatives, and the Exercise of Power

Substitutions and Equivalents

A Child’s Book of Knowledge: 00.5—00.6

Pershing Avenue, 1960

Yellow American

Raising the Stakes

Sisterhood Is Powerful

Remote Control

Hit Parade

II.

Plomo

Shadow of All Things

Talking in Italics

Anthem

Found: A Study Guide

Tío Builds a Bridge

Llorona

La Charada Cubana: A World of Things

Bicentenario

Aguacero

Found: The Doctrine of Plausible Deniability

Triste Tropique

The Love There That’s Sleeping

Sucio

Then, As Did We

Prop List

Morir Soñando

III.

Father, Won’t You Carry Me, Carry Me

Rugbeaters

Doodles and Dode

Kicks

Bookends

Word Bank

Blue Sisters of Whimsy

Gelatin Mold

I Can Afford Neither

Reliquary

The Battle Between Carnival and Lent

Lobal Warfare

Angelus Novus

Dodge

Uncivil War, Zaragoza, 1974

Façades

The Children I Keep

It Is Difficult to Get the News

The Game of Crones

The Mute Hysterics of Mayflower Lane

Grisaille

Plaza San Miguel

Nothing to Declare

Editorial Reviews

Sleeping Things is luminous, marvelously succinct, and always engaging. Iglesias renders the spectacle of growing up not with reflexive, all-too-easy nostalgia but with clear-eyed affection, meticulous precision and gusto, giving day-to-day incidents and reclaimed details of that hopeful, rambunctious Cold War era a sense of delightful enterprise and luster. This new book is a refreshingly artful, savvy meditation on the past, rife with compassion and humor, one to celebrate, savor, and enjoy!

— Cyrus Cassells, author of The Crossed-out Swastika

With stubborn joy, Iglesias refuses to let sleeping things lie, and we as readers are reawakened to why such human reclamation is so absolutely consequential. Whether turning her attention to Catholic grade school Cold War days where “students pray to pure space, that place where the future blooms,” the Cuban community in Miami conjuring an island that seems almost imaginary, or the glimpse of a younger self sipping coffee in Spain “dressed as the girl in Dylan’s song who never stumbles, who’s got no place to fall,” Iglesias unfailingly finds the pitch-perfect, sonic delight that only poetry can provide.

—David Clewell, author of Taken Somehow by Surprise

If you are a writer in want of dynamite material, it really helps if you grew up in a white bread Midwestern suburb and were taught by nuns (“Each night I pray one Hail Mary for good grades, one for a vocation, and one for miniature golf”), and as a young adult found yourself embedded in a refugee community, trapped in the middle of the culture wars. The threat of obliteration is a theme here, whether by air-raid or terrorist bomb or the conditions of exile. We may be, as the author claims, “a mere speck in the cosmos,” but in her hands, even a mere speck contains multitudes. Holly Iglesias’ Sleeping Things is a crowning achievement from one of our most wry, incisive poets—¡Perfecto!

—Madeleine Blais, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To the New Owners: a Martha's Vineyard Memoir

From the Publisher